How Fraction Helped Big Health Build and Scale a Growth Engineering Team

The Problem

Background

Big Health is a digital therapeutics company delivering automated cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) programs for insomnia, anxiety, and depression. Their FDA-cleared products, including SleepioRx and DaylightRx, serve millions of users through health plans, employers, and health systems.

Brandon Paluzzi, Big Health's first employee and Founding Engineer, had worn many hats across the company's growth, spanning traditional engineering, security, and privacy. When the company decided to stand up a dedicated growth engineering function, Paluzzi was tapped to lead it.

The challenge: growth engineering and marketing engineering were entirely new territory for him and the existing team. "I am an engineer, but I have not worked in growth engineering or marketing engineering in the past," Paluzzi explained. The team needed someone who had already navigated the complexities of this specialized discipline and could help them move quickly without costly missteps.

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The Solution

Big Health's Chief Product and Technical Officer had previously worked with Fraction and had a strong experience with the team. When the need arose to augment their full-time engineering staff, Fraction was the first call. "Fraction was kind of top of mind for him and we immediately reached out," said Paluzzi.

Fraction provided a growth engineer with direct, hands-on experience in the discipline, filling a critical knowledge gap on the team. Paluzzi described the impact in vivid terms: "It was really nice to be able to have somebody that had kind of walked those paths before and knew which way to swing the machete so that we could get through the jungle of this stuff."

This was not a generalist placement. Fraction matched Big Health with a specialist who could guide the team through the specific challenges of growth and marketing engineering, an area where missteps are common and experienced practitioners are scarce.

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The Results

The partnership delivered value on multiple levels for Big Health:

Accelerated Team Capability: Rather than spending months learning growth engineering through trial and error, Paluzzi and his team were able to move forward with confidence. "Having somebody that had done that before was super beneficial. That was a tremendous amount of value on our team," he said.

Niche Expertise Beyond General Augmentation: Paluzzi emphasized that while contract engineers bring general value to any team, the real differentiator was Fraction's ability to provide specialized talent for a niche function. "In such a niche area like growth engineering, having somebody that had done that before was super beneficial," he noted. "Even above and beyond the general value that contract engineers can bring."

A Scalable, Flexible Partnership: Paluzzi also highlighted Fraction's breadth of talent as a long-term advantage. "Fraction has such a wide variety of types of engineers. If you need a more traditional web application engineer or something more niche like a growth engineer or a marketing engineer, Fraction covers all those bases," he said. "Once you get a working relationship with Fraction started, you can really pick and choose where you need to augment your team."

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